The Magnificent Spinster

by May Sarton

  I was in Spain from September 1938 to the final debacle in 1939, and I learned all about the mixture of terror, horror, and boredom that war means. I was an ardent twenty-six-year-old when I managed to crawl over the Pyrenees with a small group of French and English volunteers, over the green mountains to the other side, barren, burned, hot as hell. I was in some ways an old woman when I disembarked from a freighter in the late summer of 1939. I have never been able to talk about what happened in that year, not even to Ruth, and I do not intend to do so here. I grew to hate the glamorous reporters who came back with books to write, all except Orwell, who was there as a soldier, and wrote the only good book, Homage to Catalonia.

  Many of the men and women I knew were killed. I was not even wounded. But I came back with something gone from me that I would never get back, the fervor that had persuaded Jane Reid to help me go. I saw what seemed from a distance the one pure war turn into a war in which Russia and Germany used the Spanish people as guinea pigs, and I came back with the political idealism I had felt burned out of me. Never again would I be as committed, even in the war against Hitler. It took me years to get sorted out and able to function.

  I was at first in a state simply of sterile exhaustion. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t talk about the experience—partly, I suppose, because I had seen so much brutality on our side, and felt it would be a sort of betrayal to speak of it. I found it difficult to eat because my stomach fluttered constantly. That at least seemed a specific enough symptom for Mother to insist that I see a doctor. Unfortunately, this specialist proved to be an angry man, furious with me after a painful examination of the colon because there was nothing wrong! He never inquired about me. Apparently the stomach was all that interested him. And when he found no tumor he scolded me roundly for not taking care of myself better, said I should rest in the afternoon, which I had been doing since my return, and made me feel altogether like a fool or a worm.

  It was then that my mother intervened. She said, “We are simply going to tell people that the doctor ordered you a complete rest for three months. Darling one, rest is what you need.”

  “Limbo”—but how could I rest at home? I couldn’t let Mother, who worked so hard every day at Warren, attend to meals and all the rest of it. How could I justify being a total dependent? I went up to my room and lay down, staring at the ceiling.

  Apparently, while I was up there, Jane dropped by for a cup of tea before going home, as she often did in those days, and persuaded Mother that it would be a positive boon if I would consent to go and rest and recuperate in Sudbury. She had just hired a couple, refugees from Hitler, to be general caretakers and to cook for her, and it was not proving to be an altogether happy arrangement because Jane herself was so rarely there, getting home for dinner sometimes at after eight, leaving the house at seven in the morning. Of course for me it was the perfect solution, and Jane picked me up late the next day to take me out to Sudbury.

  On the way, on that September evening in the dusk, she suggested that I would find a surprise, and it was clear that she looked forward as much as I did to my discovering what it was. She told me a little about the Rosenfelds and I gathered that there were problems, partly because of the language. So maybe my rusty German would be of use, I thought, while I heard that Hans, who was supposed to do odd jobs around the place was totally unsuited to any such work. He had been a brilliant lawyer in Berlin, but he had been so starved and ill-used in three months’ detention in a camp (not a concentration camp—they had escaped that) that he would never perhaps be able to resume an intellectual life. So everything depended on Thea, a huge woman with immense vitality who loved to cook … here Jane paused in her tale and seemed a little hesitant.

  “The trouble is, I don’t really want huge meals. I have dinner at school, you know, but Thea launches into pies and cakes and stews, and sometimes I just can’t eat enough to justify all that, so …” she turned to me with a twinkle, “Cam, I hope you’ll have a good appetite!”

  How could I say that I had no appetite at all? But as we got nearer to the house I began to feel dread. “Will it be all right if I just sleep a lot?” I asked. I felt totally incapable of making a connection with anyone at that point.

  While Jane was taking my suitcase out of the car and singing “Men of Harlech” as she did so, I was suddenly nearly knocked over by a huge Newfoundland puppy whose enthusiasm was immense. “That’s Nana,” Jane said, and in the gentlest of voices, which had no effect at all, “Down, Nana.”

  “Oh, so that’s the surprise!” I couldn’t help laughing, as my face had now been thoroughly licked. “Well, Nana, how are you? Are we going to be friends?” The trouble was that I felt incapable of dealing with anything as exuberant as Nana, and was quite glad to go upstairs to my room and unpack right away.

  Everything felt a little strange and difficult at first. There was something stark about the house, and why I felt that when I had been sleeping often on the ground or on straw in a barn or in a shelled-out farmhouse seems strange. But I did. There was no cosy chair or sofa where one could curl up, I soon discovered. But if there was no warmth in the furniture there was great warmth in Thea. I felt it in the way she shook my hand when we were first introduced and it sustained me through that long autumn of convalescence.

  I who had read omniverously found it impossible to concentrate for more than a half-hour, and anyway there were not many books around. I was amazed to discover that I could lie out in a deck chair with a steamer rug over my knees for hours, half dozing, aware of a bird flying past or a cloud going over, and not thinking about anything that might tear at the wound I was trying to heal. I did think a lot about Jane, as she was being revealed to me, not as the goddess of the seventh grade but on a far deeper level of reality. Those months knit together forever a friendship that was to last until her death.

  One of the things I learned about Jane was her particular way of touching people she loved. Before she left for school at seven every morning, she never failed to come and lay a hand on my shoulder. It was a light touch, without pressure, as though aware of the weight it might lay on me of possessiveness, of a demanding warmth. I’ve never known another human being whose touch was as light and as comforting as hers.

  After she had gone, the house would have felt cold and empty, except for the fact that Nana at that time of day was obviously longing for someone to throw a stick for her and I often obliged her for a half-hour or so before setting up my deck chair and settling in for a long doze, the dog at last lying beside me, her nose on her paws. Sometimes I was startled when Thea brought my lunch out on a tray … where had the morning gone? If it rained I had lunch with the Rosenfelds in the kitchen. They were eager to talk, but the language was a formidable barrier and our attempts often ended simply in laughter because we could not communicate anything well enough for our talk to be called a conversation. Hans anyway was silent more often than not. I sensed that, sheltered now, safe at last, the safety was something of a prison. Without a car, what could they do? Very occasionally they went for a walk. And I was in such a state of passive limbo that I could not put my mind on their problems.

  After lunch I went upstairs to my room and slept sometimes for two hours. Then I took Nana for a walk and once in a while stopped in on my way to visit with Elizabeth Cole, Jane’s only near neighbor, a tiny, frail woman, who was always there, sitting in her rocker on the porch or tending the geraniums in the window.

  “Well,” she always said, as if totally surprised to see me, “I never. Come in, Cam.” She must have been close to eighty, but she seemed to manage all right. After I had dropped in several times she surprised me with some rather dramatic news.

  “How is my friend Jane?” she asked that afternoon as she always did. Perhaps because Elizabeth Cole was outside Jane’s life except as a neighbor, Jane confided in her, and I sensed this.

  “She works too hard. She comes home absolutely white sometimes and then after supper corrects papers till God knows when.�
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  “I know,” Elizabeth Cole sighed. “She’ll work herself to death. She used to stop in to see me often when the house was going up, but since then, with the Rosenfelds there and all, I don’t see her.” She was rocking now slowly and looking out the window. But she came back to me and asked what had evidently been on her mind. “That man,” she said then. “Have you seen him around?”

  “What man?”

  “That rich man, Breckenridge, has the big place just across the road when you come out on route one seventeen.”

  Jane had never spoken about him. “Well, you don’t know about that, I guess.” She gave me a piercing look. “Maybe I had better hold my tongue.” Then she added with a half smile, “But I guess it’s too late, and besides, since you are living there, you had better know. She was upset when he bought that place, I can tell you.”

  “What is this all about?” Jane had always seemed so completely in control of her own life, it was hard for me to imagine any such drama going on. “Why did Jane mind his coming here?”

  Elizabeth Cole looked me straight in the eye. “He’s madly in love with her, that’s why. She thinks he moved here just to pester her, wouldn’t take no for an answer, you see.”

  “He’s not dangerous, is he?”

  “Well, before the Rosenfelds came—and I was relieved when they did, I can tell you—he used to wander around the house with a gun and peer in the windows at her. He spied on her, and you know she never pulls the shades.”

  “I can hardly believe it,” I murmured. The whole thing struck me as preposterous. “Is he crazy, or what?”

  “He has time on his hands, in spite of those expensive horses, time on his hands and Jane on his mind. It’s not good.”

  “Can’t she go to the police?”

  “There is such a thing as harassment, but I can’t see Jane going to law about such a personal matter, can you? She never talks about herself … only that one day she did. I’ve often wondered why. I suggested she get a gun and she laughed at the idea and said she did not think a shoot-out was the answer.” Elizabeth Cole chuckled, “Still,” she said, “I can’t help worrying sometimes.”

  “Why do you suppose she never married?” It was a question I had had on my mind the past weeks. I had been witnessing how much Jane gave out all the time to life. What nourished her? Marian was in England that year. There was a kind of emptiness at the heart of the house, I felt.

  “Well, I’ve thought about that some. But I never knew a woman just like Jane so I can’t figure it out. Can you?”

  “She came close to marrying a few years ago, I think, a fellow high up in international affairs, but she finally turned him down and he married someone else. At school when I was a kid we imagined the man she loved was killed in World War I. But maybe it was just a rumor. Kids are pretty romantic.”

  “She loves that school, doesn’t she? That’s when her eyes light up, when she talks about a play she is putting on.”

  “She is a marvelous teacher—the best I ever had until I went to college.” And because in the last few minutes Elizabeth Cole and I had become friends, I could say aloud what I had been thinking. “I can understand someone being madly in love with Jane; she’s so much more alive than most people, so free … and yet, there is a wall, I think. There is something she always holds in reserve. And if you were in love, it might drive you to do crazy things.”

  “Well, now that the Rosenfelds are there, she’s safe. And we can forget about Breckenridge … I’ve talked more than I should have, Cam. Bury all this, will you?”

  I realized that it was not something I could ever mention to Jane and said so.

  “Want a cookie? I made some of those ginger ones you liked last time. Take a few home for Jane, too.”

  And so that remarkable conversation ended. Nana and I walked back to the house in the crisp autumn air, watching the leaves fall one by one. I wondered whether the whole fantastic tale could be true, but Elizabeth Cole was a realistic woman and a wise one. She would not have invented such a tale, so I had to believe it. What it did was to bring into sharp focus for me, as I thought about Jane, her extraordinary glamour. What was it that could make a Breckenridge behave like a lunatic? What had made me and Faith and even Tom fall in love with Jane and want to follow her to the ends of the earth, and weep floods of tears when we left Warren to go out into the world? Lying in my deck chair the next morning I thought about it—men, women, children, all came under her spell. But she herself was absolutely unselfconscious and unaware … or so it seemed … of the aura around her. None of her sisters had this quality, unless possibly the oldest one, who, I had heard, was worldly and sophisticated, but whom I had never set eyes on.

  What was it then? An unusual capacity for enjoying life to the limit married to a great sense of responsibility? Jane was not at all self-indulgent. A single piece of chocolate was savored with the delight of a child. But she would deny herself a second. Nothing glamorous about that New England denial of the excessive! Was it the sheer exuberance? Maybe the thing about glamour is that it cannot be defined. A beautiful woman may not have it; an ugly woman can. So I finally came to the conclusion that it had to do in Jane’s case anyway with something mysterious which I reluctantly (what an academic I have become) called soul. And it was visible in those extraordinary eyes through which joy, grief, wisdom, even anger flowed. “Pallas Athene” I had used to call her when I was in the seventh grade. The mystery was something held in reserve, something I now believed no one would ever touch and reach. And perhaps glamour always has to do with the distant, the unattainable, la princesse lointaine.

  The day never seemed long until around six, when I began to wait for Jane to come home for supper. Then I allowed myself a Scotch from a bottle brought at some time by her brother-in-law, Alix’s husband, for Jane never bought liquor. Then I usually read something for an hour or two, often not really taking in so much as a page. My mind wandered. It was time to turn on lights and put another log on the fire. Where was she? Sometimes I knew she stopped in to see my mother. Sometimes it was eight when Nana let out a volley of barks and we both ran out to help carry packages in, and life came back to the house where we had all been in limbo, waiting.

  Jane always went in first to greet the Rosenfelds, then ran upstairs to wash and change into slippers, and finally came and sat down for a half-hour by the fire before our supper was served. The Jane I talked with then about what had been happening all day out in the world was not the glamorous Jane I had sometimes been thinking about. She was often dead-tired, and it showed. But still she recounted some hilarious thing that had happened that day at school and I drank it in, while Nana, beside herself with joy, tried to get into Jane’s lap. So it always ended in laughter while Jane put on a big apron and let the dog climb all over her.

  I couldn’t help being amused by her lack of capacity to deal with a large, friendly animal. And it reminded me of school days, when the inability to show anger or speak sharply had sometimes seemed a little strange. A sharp command, which is what children as well as dogs need at times, must have seemed to Jane a fascist approach to life. One must treat every living thing with respect and never impose one’s will.

  “Get down, Nana,” Jane would say gently, but the tender tone had the opposite effect of that intended and made Nana indulge in an orgy of licks, till finally Jane had to push her off and put her outdoors. More than once I laughed aloud, as we went in to supper. “What’s funny?” Jane asked, quite at sea.

  “You’re not cut out to be a Gauleiter,” I teased.

  “I should hope not! You think Nana needs a Gauleiter?”

  “Dogs must be taught to obey and are happier when they learn to.” But I know I never convinced Jane of this truth.

  After dinner more often than not the phone rang and there would be long talks full of laughter with Lucy in Philadelphia, with Edith in Texas, or with one or another of the dozens of friends in Jane’s life. I was beginning to understand the breadth and dept
h of the relationships she kept going.

  “How do you do it?” I asked once. “You never seem hurried, although you say you have papers to correct every night. You are always available to everyone who calls.”

  Jane gave me a quizzical look. “Good heavens!” she said, “Would it were true! But there is so much I don’t get done … answering letters, for instance. Half the time I simply fail to do what I want to do, what I know needs doing.”

  “How could you? Warren takes so much energy and time.” These days I sometimes resented Warren a little.

  “Do you suppose everyone lives with a sense of failure?” Jane had been standing at the door ready to go upstairs and work, but now she came and sat down in the snowshoe chair and seemed to want to talk. “Sometimes these days I feel so inadequate at school.”

  I held my breath. Jane had never confided in me before, but I knew from what Mother had said that she had a difficult class this year. Now she turned to me. “Why can’t I reach those kids?”

  “You certainly reached us.…”

  “You were a marvelous class.”

  “How we adored you!”

  Jane laughed. “I don’t want to be adored, Cam. But I sure would love to be allowed to teach without constant rebellion and brouhaha.” She said it still smiling, but I could feel the hurt underneath.

  “Mother told me there’s one awful boy.…”

  “I go and talk to your mother when I’m at the end of my tether—what a comfort she is!” Jane looked thoughtful, a little tense. “Ned is not awful, but he does react from the gut, one might say … yesterday he took the wastebasket and emptied it all over the room.”